Introduction
There can be no question that the single greatest challenge facing Philadelphia—the issue on which our city’s future will turn—is the quality of our publicly supported education.
Unless we provide our most vulnerable citizens with the skills they need to earn a decent wage, unless we provide middle-class families a reason to stay in the city rather than move to the suburbs once their kids are school-aged, no amount of tax reform or business attraction incentives will be enough to keep our daunting demographic trends—Philadelphia’s 35 percent child poverty rate portends an overall poverty rate of close to 50 percent within the next several decades—from overwhelming the city.
Last spring, I released a policy paper with dozens of detailed action items for school reform, many of which relate to issues or ideas touched upon in other articles in this special issue of the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal. In this piece, I highlight one concrete example of how I think education reform in Philadelphia should proceed.
The Penn Alexander Example
The Penn Alexander School in West Philadelphia—a successful partnership between the School District and the University of Pennsylvania—shows us both the potential of collaborating with our local universities to improve public education and also that investing in education is an economic development tool.
In the late 1990s, the University of Pennsylvania partnered with the School District of Philadelphia to create a K–8 public school, Penn Alexander, just west of the university’s campus. The idea for the school grew from Penn’s desire to stabilize and revitalize the surrounding neighborhood in the wake of a crime spike in the 1980s and 1990s, a desire intensified by the high-profile fatal stabbing of a Penn graduate student in the neighborhood in 1996.
Officials at Penn and members of the community understood the economic and social value of having quality, affordable elementary education readily available in the neighborhood. The university, under the direction of then-president Judith Rodin, sought to make the neighborhood more stable and safe by encouraging more middle-class families and Penn employees to settle there. The theory was that these residents would strengthen the neighborhood by revitalizing its historic housing stock, making lighting improvements, reducing vacancy and fueling commercial activity. Penn offered special mortgages with favorable terms, such as partial loan forgiveness and upfront grants to fund building improvements, to employees committing to live in the area for a minimum of seven years. These efforts resulted in local homes being purchased and/or rehabilitated.
Penn appreciated, however, that inventivizing new residents to move in would not be a long-term solution unless it did something about the educational options available in the area. The existing Philadelphia public schools serving the neighborhood had lackluster student achievement and reputations for violence and disorder. The risk was that new residents would move out of the area once they had school-age kids, perpetuating a historic pattern.
Accordingly, Penn decided to partner with the District to open a new K–8 school, which the university would support with both direct and in-kind contributions. When Penn Alexander opened in 2001, it had a curriculum designed by professors at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, which also trained teachers and subsidized the school’s operating costs by more than $1,000 per student (Tracy 2009). The school has been a success academically.
As a result of the quality of the education provided at Penn Alexander, the school has become a major selling point for those looking to move to the neighborhood. And it has had a significant effect on property values: Homes within the school’s catchment zone sell for $60,000 to $100,000 more than similar homes across the street but outside of the zone (Dubilet 2004). As one area realtor, Steve Drabkowski, explained: “Once the school boundary was established, it really caused the value in that catchment area to go up. Families didn’t have to worry about sending their kids to private schools or to inadequate public schools” (Lapinski 2001). Real estate prices within the catchment zone nearly tripled and home ownership rose six percent in the first several years after the school opened (Dubilet 2004).
Penn Alexander not only contributed to an increase in property values, it also added stability to a neighborhood in transition. “I think from a social standpoint, what building a school has done is begun to stabilize the neighborhood . . . because now people feel comfortable staying and raising their children in the area,” said Nancy Roth, president of the Spruce Hill Community Association (Dubilet 2004).
Given what we know about a major reason families move out of the city when they have children—namely, to access high-quality suburban public schools—it should come as no surprise that the availability of quality public education is a major factor in a neighborhood’s desirability and is reflected in property values. Taking this one step further, the effect of Penn Alexander on its neighborhood is clear evidence that investing in publicly supported education could be an economic development tool for Philadelphia, particularly in transitioning neighborhoods with quality housing stock.